This one’s going to be a
very quick Doctor Who Target Book Review.
Well it’s a Terrance Dicks novelization of a story that he helped write
and Script Edit when it was aired on television, and he doesn’t really change
much. Yes this novel is one that doesn’t
have a lot of differences from the original television story and while
sometimes that makes the novelized version a better version of the story, this
time it doesn’t work. Dicks does the
best work when he is adding in a bit of internal thoughts to some of even the
more minor of characters which is done really well in the novel. The fail however comes in the fact that some
of the best parts of the original broadcast story come from the direction of
the television serial and how exactly Ferguson decided to shoot the Ambassadors
to make them feel scary. Also the
description of their touches really doesn’t do much where at least on
television made a sound and had a flash of light before they died. The novel just has them die with a vague
explanation about how heat was given off from the people as they died.
To summarize, The Ambassadors of Death is a
novelization that is hurt by its adaptation being direct from the television
story. It would be much better just to
go and watch the television story than reading the novel as while still really
good, it is a Terrance Dicks book after all, the book suffers extremely from
changing mediums from a visual medium to the medium of print. 80/100
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